From integrability to conductance, impurity systems

In this expository article, we present a systematic formal derivation of the Kubo formula for the linear-response current due to a time-harmonic electric field applied to non-interacting, spinless charged particles in a finite volume in the quantum setting. We model dissipation in a transparent way by assuming a sequence of scattering events occurring at random-time intervals modeled by a Poisson distribution. By taking the large-volume limit, we derive special cases of the f...

We analyse the finite temperature charge stiffness D(T>0), by a generalization of Kohn's method, for the problem of a particle interacting with a fermionic bath in one dimension. We present analytical evidence, using the Bethe ansatz method, that D(T>0) is finite in the integrable case where the mass of the particle equals the mass of the fermions and numerical evidence that it vanishes in the nonintegrable one of unequal masses. We conjecture that a finite D(T>0) is a generi...

The single impurity problem in a spinful Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid is studied numerically using path-integral Monte Carlo methods. The advantage of our approach is that the system allows for extensive analyses of charge and spin conductance in the non-perturbative regime. By closely examining the behavior of conductances at low temperatures, in the presence of a finite backward scattering barrier due to the impurity, we identified four distinct phases characterized by either ...

We study interacting one dimensional (1D) quantum lattice gases with integrable impurities. These model Hamiltonians can be derived using the quantum inverse scattering method for inhomogeneous models and are by construction integrable. Absence of backscattering at the impurities is shown to be the characteristic feature of these disordered systems. The value of the effective carrier charge and the Sutherland-Shastry relation are derived for the half-filled XXX model and are ...

Low-temperature electronic conductance in nanocontacts, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), and metal break junctions involving magnetic atoms or molecules is a growing area with important unsolved theoretical problems. While the detailed relationship between contact geometry and electronic structure requires a quantitative ab initio approach such as density functional theory (DFT), the Kondo many-body effects ensuing from the coupling of the impurity spin with metal electro...

We establish the equivalence between the problem of a solitary potential scatterer in a Luttinger liquid of spinless repulsive fermions and an anisotropic Kondo model where the value of the impurity spin id determined by the scaling dimension of the scattering potential. The Bethe ansatz is used to derive non-perturbative expressions for the capacitance and conductance.

We develop a new numerical method to calculate the Landauer conductance through an interacting electron system in the first order perturbation or in the self-consistent Hartree-Fock approximation. It is applied to one and two dimensional systems with nearest-neighbor electron-electron interaction.

We present a Keldysh-based derivation of a formula, previously obtained by Oguri using the Matsubara formalisum, for the linear conductance through a central, interacting region coupled to non-interacting fermionic leads. Our starting point is the well-known Meir-Wingreen formula for the current, whose derivative w.r.t.\ to the source-drain voltage yields the conductance. We perform this derivative analytically, by exploiting an exact flow equation from the functional renorma...

We apply the generating function technique developed by Nazarov to the computation of the density of transmission eigenvalues for a two-dimensional free massless Dirac fermion, which, e.g., underlies theoretical descriptions of graphene. By modeling ideal leads attached to the sample as a conformal invariant boundary condition, we relate the generating function for the density of transmission eigenvalues to the twisted chiral partition functions of fermionic ($c=1$) and boson...

Here we report on our project concerning the application of time dependent DMRG to strongly correlated systems. We show that a previously reported simulation of the spin charge separation in a one-dimensional Hubbard system exceeds a relative error of 100% in the spin sector. In the second part we discuss the application of the Kubo formula to obtain linear conductance for the interacting resonant level model.